PS4: Install an SSD or HHD to speed up game loading time by 20 seconds or more

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The PS4 ships with a reasonably-sized 500GB hard drive, but it’s quite lackluster in terms of speed. The drive only spins at 5400 RPM, but it can be easily upgraded to a better drive — say, a 7200 RPM hard drive — without voiding your warranty. But why stop there? What happens when the default drive is replaced with a solid state drive or a hybrid drive? The real-world tests are in, and the results are actually quite surprising.

The good folks over at Tested compared the default drive, a hybrid drive, and an SSD with a number of different tasks on the PS4. Across the board, the SSD out-performed the default drive, but the results were shockingly close. As it turns out, the HHD performs nearly as well as the SSD, but at a fraction of the price.

Booting up with the standard drive, it takes just under 26 seconds to reach the PS4’s UI. The hybrid drive drops that to 20.3 seconds, and the SSD shaves it down to 19.5 seconds. With the digital-only version of Killzone, the standard drive takes about 60 seconds to load up a map. In comparison, the hybrid drive only needs 42 seconds, and the SSD smokes the competition at only 39 seconds. While loading the disc-based version of Knack (already installed), the HDD took just under 40 seconds. On the other hand, the HHD and SSD are only a fraction of a second apart in the range of about 34 seconds.

Okay, we’re dealing with a few seconds one way or the other. Why does it matter? Simply put, this performance gap adds up over time. If you spend a few hours playing a game in a single sitting, you could potentially hit dozens of load screens. While a few extra seconds on a single load doesn’t make much of a difference, it really drags down the entire experience in the long run.

PS4 hard drive caddy, showing the special PlayStation screw

The hybrid drives are a special case here, mind you. They still use spinning platters, but the drive “intelligently” caches recent and frequently used data onto a relatively small portion of flash storage. Depending on the specific implementation, the results could potentially vary wildly. In these tests, the HHD seems absurdly fast, suggesting Tested had already loaded each game a few times, to get the flash storage primed for action. Each drive manufacturer uses its own secret sauce to decide what data stays on the flash portion of the drive, so your milage may vary. If you’re pulling data from the platters — such as loading a new game or app for the first time — you still have the same wait as a standard drive.

I decided to stick with a traditional 7200 RPM drive for my PS4, and I’ve been happy with the results so far. I’ve yet to see the hard data regarding PS4 load times with a faster spinning drive, but the additional storage space on my 1TB drive alone was worth the $88 expense, especially as I’ve decided that I will eschew game discs with my PS4 and go all-digital instead.

Confirmed with surprising openness to be running at a straight 720p resolution at 30fps, Dead Rising 3 has much to prove to early Xbox One buyers.

Inevitably, much of this comes at a price; specifically to the
frame-rate. When dealing with the signature scenes involving uncountable
enemies on-screen, we’re left with some very sluggish motion, while the
streaming system also seems to spike CPU, resulting in lost
performance. The statement from the team is that a locked 30fps is
targeted here, but in the build we saw there’s a huge gap to be bridged
in this regard; drops to 20fps are consistent and sustained when
outdoors, with 16fps being our record low during some of the biggest
explosions. With Battlefield 4 on Xbox One, the drop to 720p opened the
door to 60fps gameplay – Dead Rising 3’s big issue is that despite the
upgrades, the feeling in terms of refresh and response often feels very
much like a poorly optimised current-gen title.
“

chojin999

Downvoting me it’s not going to make PS4 and XBoxOne any faster. That is for sure.

Outdated, obsolete crap slow cheap hardware it’s just what it is.

chojin999

Go on Sony employees..keep voting me down using your multiple fake accounts here. It’s just beyond pathetic. You can’t have all people in the world shut up and be blind at your will.

babyrhinos

You do realize you’re talking to yourself, right?

Phobos

It’s very sad no one pays attention to Chojin999

Daydreamer

Best not to feed the troll.

Nicholas Gatewood

Hahaha, you complete and total derp. There’s a big difference between the Xbone and PS4 on a hardware level, with over 90% of its games running at native 1080p. Xbone, not so much.

Also, sane people are downthumbing you, not Sony employees. You sound crazy.

IKROWNI

i though originally there were claims that the loading speeds were super fast on ps4 like almost instantly? now your talking about cutting 20 seconds off load times only, for more than the price of the entire console alone. jesus i cant wait till the ps5 comes out and blows away the console fanboys with 1080p at 60fps without dips constantly plagueing the console these people will be blown away while pc moves into full on virtual reality in higher resolutions than the ps4 can handle in 2d

Timmehhh

You are thinking about the ‘suspend mode’. Which is not available at launch and will come in an update. Game data is not going to magically appear on the RAM so there will always be load times limited by read speeds.

All games are different and sometimes better polygon counts, textures, AI or model animations are preferred over higher resolution. This is why GT6 is 1080p on the PS3. CoD ghosts is 1080p 60fps on PS4. But let me guess, you would rather play Pong at 4k yeah?

Btw, you know what you are comparing when you say PC? EVERYTHING. There is no single PC with fixed specs, you can get PCs better AND worse than a PS4. You’re comparison doesn’t mean anything.

Phobos

Spot on, that guy only brags about how he’s going to game at 4k like if it was the best thing to ever happen to gaming and how Steam is going to revolutionize games forever, quite pathetic and sad.

IKROWNI

Still taking time to ride my D I see phobos. You really can skip right by my comments man. I will not have any hard feelings if I never see a comment from you on my comments again. I’m more in the market for intelligent conversation from the few around here that can hold an intelligent conversation anyway. Its quite funny that fanboys are willing to believe that games having cleaner code written will magically make a 7850 turn into a 7970. When they say they are optimizing something by taking it from 720p and upping the resolution to 1080p that part is believable, while at the same time they never seem to mention what is being lost in the process. Ask yourself what settings were sacrificed to make the game “playable” at that resolution. Was it the shadows? View distance? Lighting? Draws? Anti-aliasing? Fps? Server size?

Anyways they have to hit that sweet spot where they are just barely able to pull off 1080p @ 60 fps so to do this they “optimize” the settings, slowly sacrificing other settings until boom your left with a game stripped of its beauty by hey its finally running in that sweetspot. After about the first year or two new game engines will come to life bringing with them even better graphics, and easier ways to achieve these graphics. But there is a slight issue, sony has no magic wand to make the old hardware perform better. If this were the case don’t you think AMD would have made these chips perform at top level from the get go? Why would AMD sabotage there own chips so that sony could incrementally increase its performance? And if sony under clocked your console on purpose, why u not pissed?

The devs can build the game in correlation to this unified hardware if they wish, but it does not mean that certain features aren’t being cut to bring them to you in 1080p.

Phobos

Yet you never stop bashing consoles, even when its irrelevant and you never stop writing long boring comments along with kissing Steams ass.

IKROWNI

I never really said much at all about the xbone tbh. I think the xbone has shit graphics but looks like a descent media box, as far as gaming on it though I’m cool. I’m growing tired the entire conversation. I guess let’s just sit back and wait for more reviews and magical patches that morphs hardware into future hardware. So let’s just agree to disagree. Agreed Phobos?

Phobos

In all honesty both consoles and pc’s have their strength and weaknesses, my main gripe about gaming on the pc is the lack of exclusive titles. Every fps that comes out is for both pc and consoles sure fps will always play and look better on the pc but I’m sick and tired of BF and the CoD outside of those two there aren’t really that many left. Long and gone are Doom, Quake, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Hexen and Bioshock ( yes that one its still around but the DRM kill it for me) oh yeah also Half-Life, waiting for the third one to come out who knows when.

rahuldey85

The PS3 and Xbox360 are able to run games like GTAV and Battlefield 4 with pre DirectX 10 hardware. Games like this were not conceivable back then but they are definitely running on 6-7 year old hardware. The current gen is at least 5 times as powerful as prev gen and hence can run games that look as 5 times more detailed, keeping all other factors like AI constant.

Jeremy Smith

I doubt when, and if the ps5 even comes out, that 1080p will still be relevant.

Jewy McJew

A SATA III interface would have been just super-duper. Other than that, loving the new console.

Jewy McJew

A SATA III interface would have been just super-duper. Other than that, loving the new console.

Basil Nolan

Not the same time reduction as in PC. Wonder why.

Marc Guillot

looks hard to explain, indeed.

Innocent Bystander

They probably went with a crippled SATA implementation again, as with the PS3.

IB

Winston Smith

That blows my mind. I don’t know what the factory cast of a SATA II/III connection is but it must be pennies.

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